Charlie Billingham

Charlie Billingham produces paintings, prints and site-responsive installations using expanded approaches to painting that refer to the history of British Satirical print, both through their uses of graphic boldness and in their repeated appropriations of fractured imagery whose details quote Gillray, Rowlandson and a Hogarthian comic narrative tradition. Although we can identify things in Charlie Billingham’s work as part of a certain idea of the past – baggy britches, towering wigs, swags of jewellery, vaguely scatological humour – their presentation (in bits, in fragments) suggests a kind of dispersal, a refusal to fully cohere. Billingham holds the bits at bay: the past stays past. Late 18th and early 19th century motifs – big Regency bums in wigs or britches; bonnets with cascading feathers; big-buttoned waistcoats – are repeated in an array of decorative colours, either as wallpaper or as reversible motifs on canvases.